Death, Taxes and Estates: Part 4

October 15, 2025 RobH1 Comment

I am not a lawyer, accountant or tax expert. Your situation may be a lot different than mine. Seek professional guidance if needed.

Part 1 of this blog is found here, Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here.

Current Status or Why is the CRA so dysfunctional?

Yesterday, I received a series of emails¹ from CRA (I had registered for electronic notifications for all things pertaining to the estate, which I highly recommend²). Two of the emails (totally identical) informed me that the address of the estate had changed (what?!!?) and one email, reading very carefully, I think was telling me that a Notice of Assessment for the Estate return had been completed. Here, judge for yourself, this is what the email looked like:

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) sent new mail online to ESTATE OF xxx called:
Notice of assessment
This mail may require your attention.
If you have My Trust Account, sign-in via Represent A Client and click on “Mail” to read the mail.
If you signed up to receive mail online but don’t have My Trust Account, go to the CRA web page to register.

Ok, I am going to rant a little bit at this point in time about how inept this communication is.

Why is it so hard for the CRA to send email communications that don’t sound like form letters?
- Here’s how a normal human might write this: “A Notice of Assessment has been completed for your estate account. Login to Represent a Client³ using your Rep ID and the Trust Account Number to view it.“
Why doesn’t CRA know that I have a My Trust account? Of course I do, that’s how you’re emailing me about matters pertaining to the estate.
Why is no detail offered around where to register for a My Trust account? (“The CRA web page” is about as helpful as saying “Google it”⁴).

Of course, this is all nit-picking. My biggest beef is that this Notice of Assessment is being posted 17 weeks after they cashed the cheque for taxes owing on the estate return. In a world where we have self-driving cars how is it ok that it takes 4 months to feed a form into some software somewhere? And this is normal, per the CRA website.

Of course, it gets better. I now go to login to My Trust Account (a term I hadn’t heard before, it’s accessed the same way as you Represent a Client), and I see that the address of the estate is correct (phew), but there’s no indication of any Notice of Assessment, and the status message concerning the T3 that was showing up a week ago has disappeared. Clicking through to the “Balances” portion generates a vague error message.

Perhaps it’s helpful to explain what I expected to see at this juncture:

An electronic Notice of Assessment
A balance of zero

Not hard, right?

And so, off to the CRA call centre I went. Speakerphone? Check. Coffee? Check.

After listening to the various options (which take a really long time to work through, especially since one has to listen to messages about My Account and being nice⁵) I did reach a human in about 10 minutes, which is actually pretty good. Lori was pleasant and helpful, but after about 50 minutes of various holds and questions asked and answered, Lori decided that this was actually a problem for the digital services team to handle. And so I was transferred. I crossed my fingers, since what often happens at this stage is to either get disconnected or punted to the back of a 2 hour queue. Instead, I was connected to another pleasant and helpful agent immediately.

In less than 10 minutes, Sandra had an answer for me: the reason I couldn’t see the Notice of Assessment that was posted was because the estate, in CRA’s eyes, had ceased to exist. The final return was successfully submitted, the balance was zero and so online access was clearly no longer needed.

And so, I therefore needed to wait for a paper Notice of Assessment delivered via snail mail which could take anywhere up until mid-November, per the helpful agent.

Next steps

Patience in wrapping up an estate, as I hope this post has illustrated, is an absolute requirement. Even if you do all the things right like

filing on time
using CRA’s e-services like My Account, Represent a Client and My Trust Account
paying your balance promptly

You can still expect lengthy, CRA-imposed delays.

Once I get the paper Notice of Assessment, my accountant tells me filing for a Clearance Certificate (form TX19) is fast. But once again, you’ll have to deal with CRA’s service standard, which is currently stated to be 120 calendar days from form reception (4 months in human terms).

If all goes well, I should be done about a year after I filed and paid the two tax returns (final return and estate return) with CRA; these delays are all CRA-imposed. Instead of talking about non-stories like the $660k tax bill⁶, perhaps the Canadian media would prefer to take a closer look at how Canadians are being served (or not) by the CRA when it comes to estates.

Questions? Comments? Let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

Total: 3, all received in rapid succession ↩︎
Especially given how unreliable snail mail has become with labour disruptions and whatnot. ↩︎
Represent a Client is a super-useful CRA service if you’re a financial caregiver. I used it when my parents were alive to help with tax matters, and it’s the same login when dealing with an estate, except then the CRA seems to call it “My Trust Account” in that case. ↩︎
Yeah, sure, don’t include hyperlinks in emails, I know, I know. But is this really the best we can do here? ↩︎
I make extensive use of any digital service offered by the CRA. Telling me about them isn’t necessary. Nor is it necessary to tell me to be nice, I’m always very nice to people on the phone. They are trying to help me and it’s not their fault that they don’t have the tools they need to do their job well. I do wonder whether warnings to “be nice” actually have any effect on the caller who is habitually aggressive or abusive? I really doubt it. ↩︎
Why is it a non-story? Because the “news” is that if you have a massive net worth (715k RRSP, million dollar secondary property), you can expect to pay a massive tax bill when you’re dead. Is this surprising to anyone? ↩︎

News: Wealthsimple ends cashback on prepaid Mastercard

October 8, 2025October 6, 2025 RobHLeave a comment

Wealthsimple’s prepaid Mastercard (aka the Cash Card) has stopped offering cashback on purchases, effective October 2nd, 2025. Don’t confuse this with Wealthsimple’s Visa card, which is an actual credit card, and still offers a nice 2% cashback reward.

I’ve been a fan of Wealthsimple’s prepaid Mastercard for a while now. I wrote about it over here. My favourite feature of this prepaid Mastercard is that it does not charge the usual 1.5% foreign exchange fees most other credit cards bury in their transaction costs.

The demise of the 1% bonus isn’t a deal-breaker for me but it was nice while it lasted. The card is also noteworthy because it permits ATM access globally with no fees. This isn’t a feature I’ve used, but it might be of interest.

I signed up for the waitlist for Wealthsimple’s Visa card when it was released, but the rollout has been v-e-r-y slow, and I’m still waiting for that to materialize¹. Once I get my hands on one, I will have no incentive to use the prepaid card since the Visa card also offers no-charge foreign exchange AND 2% cashback on all purchases. That’s a great deal.

About every third post on Reddit’s Wealthsimple sub is complaining about the slow rollout. ↩︎

HISA and HISA-like ETF Table for October 2025

October 6, 2025October 3, 2025 RobH1 Comment

HISAs are “High Interest Savings Accounts” and offer a nearly zero risk, highly liquid way to earn some interest on your cash holdings. If your broker doesn’t give you access to HISAs (or you have to pay large transaction fees to acquire them), then there’s also ETFs that fit the bill, and some of them are now in this table, too.

Since there’s no central bank meetings until the very end of this month, most of the September 2025 version of this table applies. The exception are the ETFs, which publish new yields monthly, so those figures are updated in the table below:

Provider	Fund	Link	Rate Sheet	Rate
RBC	RBF2011, RBF2021, RBF2031, RBF2041	RBC	Link	2.30%
Scotiabank	DYN6004, DYN5004, DYN3065, DYN3055, DYN3075	Scotiabank	Link	2.45%
Equitable Bank	EQB1001, ETR1001	Equitable Bank	n/a	2.30%
TD	TDB8151, TDB8156, TDB8158, TDB8160	TD	n/a	2.30%
Renaissance	ATL5071	Renaissance	n/a	2.30%
Home Trust	HOM101, HOM201	Home Trust	Link	2.40%
B2B	BTB101	B2B Bank	n/a	2.40%
Manulife	MIP610, MIP810	Manulife	n/a	2.15%
National Bank	NBC200, NBC6200, NBC8200	NBI Altamira CashPerformer	n/a	2.30%
Global X	CASH	CASH Fact Sheet	n/a	2.39%¹
Evolve	HISA	HISA Fact Sheet	n/a	2.39%²
BMO	ZMMK	ZMMK Fact Sheet	n/a	2.76%³

Canadian HISA and HISA-like ETF rates, last updated October 3 2025

ZMMK is a very short-term bond fund that carries more risk than a HISA, but gives a slightly better return as a result. ZMMK appears in my ETF All-Stars list.

Since I hold a substantial amount of USD-denominated ETFs, I also track US interest rates.

Provider	Fund	Link	Rate Sheet	Rate
RBC	RBF2015	RBC	Link	3.90%
Scotiabank	DYN6005, DYN5005	Scotiabank	Link	3.90%
Equitable Bank	EQB1101, ETR1101	Equitable Bank	n/a	3.80%
TD	TDB8153	TD	n/a	3.90%
Renaissance	ATL5075	Renaissance	n/a	3.90%
Manulife	MIP611	Manulife	n/a	3.05%
National Bank	NBC201	NBI Altamira CashPerformer	n/a	3.90%
Global X	UCSH	UCSH Fact Sheet	n/a	3.96%⁴
Evolve	HISU	HISU Fact Sheet	n/a	3.96%⁵
iShares	ICSH	ICSH Fact Sheet	n/a	4.48%⁶

USA HISA and HISA-like ETF rates, last updated October 3, 2025

UCSH and HISU invest in HISAs exclusively; I instead use ICSH which is a rough equivalent of ZMMK in terms of portfolio makeup. Like ZMMK, I enjoy a slight premium in yield as a reward for taking a bit more risk.

September 29 distribution ↩︎
September 25 distribution ↩︎
September 29 distribution ↩︎
September 29 distribution ↩︎
September 25 distribution ↩︎
October 1 distribution ↩︎

What’s in my non-registered portfolio? (Oct 2025)

October 2, 2025 RobH3 Comments

Every month, I try to share with you what’s in my overall retirement portfolio (September 2025 post is here). That retirement portfolio is actually distributed over a bunch of accounts held by me and my spouse and includes RRIFs, TFSAs and non-registered accounts. This is what it looks like at the moment:

*Retirement savings as of October 1, 2025 by account type*

(My multi-asset tracker is a handy tool to help you quickly create charts that look like the above one).

My current strategy for these three account types looks like this:

RRIF: This is 100% invested in my ETF all-stars. I’m currently withdrawing RRIF minimum payments for two main reasons:
- To avoid problems with attribution. I cover that topic over here.
- To avoid withholding tax. RRIF minimum payments don’t attract withholding tax, but I am setting aside some of my payments to deal with the unavoidable tax bill come April 2026. I talked about that topic over here.
TFSA: This is mostly invested in the ETF all-stars, but there’s a few stragglers in here¹ that I really ought to get rid of. Nothing wrong with the funds in there, but it’s a needless complexity. The TFSA continues to get new funds since it’s hard to beat tax-free growth, and I only buy all-stars with those funds. It will get drawn down last in my retirement planning.
Non-registered accounts: Here it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, with very little invested in the all-stars, mostly because most of the equity found here was bought long ago, and changing what I hold would attract capital gains that I would prefer to take on my own terms. It’s where the majority of my early-retirement decumulation takes place.

Here’s what that breakfast looks like:

*What’s in my non-registered portfolio, October 2025*

Here’s a look at each holding, from highest to lowest percentage.

HXT: This is a Canadian equity ETF that does not pay dividends, instead using some wizardry to bury it all in the per-unit price of the ETF. This simplifies taxes, and I have held this fund for a long time. Due to increasing costs of this ETF, it’s among the first to get liquidated as I need funds.

XIC: Canadian equity fund, very popular. I think I bought it to create a bit of dividend income. It will get liquidated after the Horizons funds go (HXS, HXT, HXDM).

SCHF: A very low-cost international equity² fund in USD that I’ve held for a very long time. It’s funds like SCHF that attracted me to investing in USD, which, at present, adds a lot of complexity.

ICSH: This is one of the all-stars. It is what my VPW cash cushion is invested in³. I use ICSH more than ZMMK in the cash cushion because US interest rates are quite a bit higher than Canadian rates at the moment. I talked about that here.

HXS: Same idea as HXT, except it invests in the S&P 500. This one is held only by my spouse who is still working for a living, so this will just stick around a while, until she stops working and can take on the capital gains.

VSC: A bond fund held by my spouse. I may sell this to harvest some capital gains losses.

HXDM: Same idea as HXT, except international equity. It is on the list to liquidate.

ZMMK: An all-star, held in the same account as ICSH.

The rest (XEQT, TEQT, XGRO) are all new arrivals in the portfolio, purchased using dividends⁴ from the other funds as well as the bonus payments I keep collecting from Questrade for switching to them.

My non-registered accounts are only a small portion of my retirement holdings, but there’s a fair bit of complexity there. Over time, these accounts will go to zero other than the cash cushion portion (ZMMK, ICSH or whatever replacements I discover) which will remain as long as VPW is my decumulation strategy.

Mostly pure Canadian equity funds. This is to offset AOA that has next-to-no Canadian equity component. ↩︎
0.03% MER. Cheap! ↩︎
VPW = Variable Percentage Withdrawal, an absolutely brilliant strategy for making sure you don’t run out of money in retirement and don’t leave a lot on the table. Read all about it here. ↩︎
With all ETF trades being free, I hold very little actual cash in any of my accounts. ↩︎

Managing decumulation as one gets older

October 1, 2025September 30, 2025 RobH2 Comments

My approach to investing for the last 20 years or so has been almost exclusively¹ DIY. The other popular approach to investing is to have a fee-based advisor who typically charges anywhere from 1% to 2% of your overall holdings. For that princely sum, you probably get an in-person meeting or two annually, all the trades deemed necessary, and some nicely formatted full-colour report once a year. Value for money for a fee-based advisor is too low for me to consider it. Nobody will ever care as much about my own investments as I do.

I am trying to be realistic about the future, however. My current retirement payment scheme is rather labour-intensive, for instance:

I have to manually sell RRIF funds every month to make my RRIF-minimum payments. This normally means selling XGRO which makes up the bulk of my RRIF accounts.
I have to manually move money around between brokerage accounts to tweak VPW’s cash cushion; excess funds here get invested in ZMMK or ICSH so they generate a return
Since RRIF-minimum payments are not currently sufficient to fund my lifestyle, I augment this with sales of non-registered funds…and I have to pick which fund to sell considering capital gains impact as well as asset-allocation²
- …and I have to manually move the cash resulting from the sale to my bank account
I continue to maintain a heavy allocation to USD-denominated funds, and since most of my spending is in Canadian dollars, I have to systematically³ convert my USD holdings to CAD, typically using Norbert’s Gambit
And I continue to contribute to a TFSA monthly, so appropriate⁴ purchases have to made there, too

So I will start looking at alternative (and more costly) arrangements. Right now, I’m thinking robo-advisors⁵. Off the top of my head, there are three I want to take a look at:

Nest Wealth: They are immediately interesting to me because of their flat fee structure. Most other advisors charge you a percentage based on the size of your portfolio, which strikes me as unfair. Is a 50k portfolio really ten times easier to manage than a 500k portfolio? If you looked at the fees most providers charge, you’d believe it to be the case.
Wealthsimple: I do self-directed business with Wealthsimple today, and have actually talked to one of their advisors about this service. I need to understand their service better.
Questrade: I do self-directed business with Questrade today. I’ve not investigated their robo-advisor service much.

Is there a robo that you use that I should know about? Let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

Before I retired this year, I did pay for an advice-only advisor to make sure my retirement savings would support my retirement needs. I do recommend doing that, as it’s helpful to have somebody else look at your numbers if only for peace of mind. Beyond that, I don’t pay any management fees except what’s embedded in the ETFs I use, most of which are on my ETF All-Stars list. ↩︎
Meaning, for example: should I sell HXT (a fund fully invested in Canadian equities) or HXS (a fund fully invested in US equities)? Should I sell from MY non-registered account or that of my spouse? ↩︎
Currently quarterly, at a rate consistent with the percentages dictated by RRIF minimum. For example, at age 57, RRIF minimum is 3.03% of RRIF value. So in January, I look at how many USD I have in my RRIF, multiply that by 3.03%, and divide by 4. That determines how much USD I have to convert every quarter. . ↩︎
Relying on my multi-asset tracker spreadsheet ↩︎
This term seems to be falling out of fashion in favour of “managed” portfolios. As long as the fees are low, they will be robo-advisors to me… ↩︎

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